My latest book "No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power" shows women how to lead and live without limits. My passion? To break the 18% of top leadership barrier where women have been stuck for decades. I'm a frequent and, if I say so myself, powerful speaker for corporate and professional groups. I learned about leadership and women’s relationship with power on the frontline, rising from teen mom from rural Texas to president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. That's why “People” Magazine called me “the voice of experience” and Vanity Fair named me to America's Top 200 Women Legends, Leaders, and Trailblazers. Now, in addition to writing books and speaking, I teach "Women, Power, and Leadership" at Arizona State University. You'll often catch me talking about these issues on national TV, radio, and in written commentaries.

Will Equal Pay Make You Submissive in Bed?

I raise this question because today I experienced the disorienting juxtaposition of Equal Pay Day with the retro notion that women’s growing economic power makes us want to be dominated during sex.

Equal Pay Day marks the day in April when women wear red to signify we’re in the red, earning (by 2011 calculations) but 77.4 cents to men’s $1. And for African-American and Hispanic women the differential is significantly more extreme.

“It is intriguing that huge numbers of women are eagerly consuming myriad and disparate fantasies of submission at a moment when women are ascendant in the workplace…when—in hard economic terms—women are less dependent or subjugated than before.

It is probably no coincidence that, as more books like The Richer Sex by Liza Mundy and Hanna Rosin’s forthcoming The End of Men appear, there is a renewed popular interest in the stylized theater of female powerlessness…We may then be especially drawn to this particular romanticized, erotically charged, semi-pornographic idea of female submission at a moment in history when male dominance is shakier than it has ever been.”

Really? And whose preferred narrative do we think this zero-sum “power-over” social model is?

Even if we bought the logical framework, assertions of female dollar dominion are greatly overstated. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 28.9% of wives in dual income families out earn their husbands. If my elementary school math holds up, that means more than 70% of men still out earn their wives.

And because women don’t negotiate as aggressively as men and don’t toot their own horns as flagrantly, each woman who works for pay outside the home (note the language here, Hilary Rosen) gets ever-farther behind in the paycheck race, amassing a half-million dollar average deficit by retirement age.

Here’s a dandy little chart created by Catalyst that lays it out starkly.

Men Hold the Vast Majority of Positions of Power (and Remuneration) in the United States.

Table: Percentage of Women and Men in Positions of Power in the United States, 2011

For men, the “mine is bigger than his” ideal, whether we’re talking paycheck, possessions, or penis, isn’t mitigated by any cultural narrative of a presumed desire for powerlessness. So why should a desire for powerlessness be inherently true for women?

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Thanks Victoria. Good point about sexual likes and dislikes pre-dating one’s first job and relationships. I’ll add that to the list of why Roiphe is wrong and for all her intelligence isn’t smart enough not to buy into precisely the narrative the men who don’t want women to have a fair and equal share have created to keep us in line.

I agree with you that the theory that increased pay makes women submissive due to their desire for powerlessness is unsound. However, you by no means effectively debunk that theory. You use one example – yourself – to make an extremely weak inductive argument. The fact that you do not behave as the theory suggests that the majority of women do does little to debunk it. I understand that you were probably being flippant in response to what you believe is a flippant theory. However, using sloppy logic because you feel that you can does little to elevate the discussion or our respective intellects.